Hollywood Stars Research Articles

Biopics of Female Hollywood Stars Speak to #MeToo Era: The Case of Judy (2019) and Blonde (2022)

This article analyzes two recent biopics, Judy (2019, Rupert Goold) and Blonde (2022, Andrew Dominik), which reimagine the icons from the Hollywood Golden Era, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe respectively, under the prism of the #MeToo movement. By examining the way in which these movies treat abusive experiences within the film industry, along with their placement in the public arena, this paper exposes how contemporary biopics dedicated to female movie stars face the consequences of #MeToo in Hollywood. In terms of textual construction, both movies presumptively adopt a female perspective in portraying actresses’ experiences of exploitation –such as sexual harassment, eating disorders, substance abuse, and more– under a male-dominated Hollywood studio system. Meanwhile, directors’ articulated intentions, promotional campaigns, reviews, and film critiques seeking to convincingly place the films in the domain of public discussion around #MeToo. Despite this ‘feminist’ assumption, this article will argue that these movies, while appearing to confront and re-address injustices in Hollywood through revisiting the mythical narratives of well-known female stars, fail to challenge the melodramatic victimization plot familiar in traditional biopics about women. In doing so, it will explore how they reinforce a representation of the female Hollywood star after #MeToo as a mentally troubled woman struggling to survive in an exploitative film industry.

The Hollywood gender gap: the role of action films

AbstractWe estimate gender earnings differentials among Hollywood stars. While this market should be particularly efficient in translating productivity into earnings, we demonstrate an unexplained female earnings gap of over two million dollars a film. Critically, we show that action films drive this gap. Our movie fixed effects estimate a much larger-million-dollar gap among action movies and a smaller statistically insignificant gap among other genres. Within the other genres, the one significant earnings gap is among stars older than 50. We argue that these patterns could reflect “consumer discrimination” but also raise other possibilities.

Brief encounter: Matt Damon in Marseille

ABSTRACT Stillwater McCarthy (2021) brings together Matt Damon, a Hollywood star with cosmopolitan credentials, and Marseille, a crucible of civilizations often described as a cosmopolitan city. Damon plays Bill Baker, an Oklahoman redneck who must travel regularly to Marseille to visit his daughter in jail. For Bill, a character from a small, quiet mid-U.S. town, Marseille is all excess and opacity, almost impossible to navigate. Large parts of the film are spoken in French, a language that the protagonist neither speaks nor understands.This article uses a cosmopolitan perspective to explore the consequences of the encounter between the Hollywood star and the European city. As will be argued, the ambivalent cosmopolitanism of both Damon’s star persona and Marseille converge in an irresistible but ultimately impossible way. This article explores the dynamics between these two drives by means of a spatial perspective that sheds some light on the multiplying facets of cosmopolitanism in contemporary cinema, including mainstream cinema, and highlights the fraught interface between cosmopolitanism as a utopian ethical aspiration and political agenda, on the one hand, and an everyday reality, on the other.

Sense and sensibility in intellectual discourse on YouTube: Anti-emotional positioning in the case of Affleck vs. Harris

ABSTRACT This article aims to explain the behaviour of public intellectuals, celebrities, and media audiences in the construction of anti-emotional narratives in the online culture wars. In the investigation of how these narratives are constructed on YouTube, the article focuses on the rhetorical juxtaposition of rationality and emotionality surrounding the viral argument between public intellectual Sam Harris and Hollywood star Ben Affleck on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, uploaded to YouTube. The video is an apt example of the positioning dynamics on YouTube, where an increased integration of media content with its context of reception unsettles the positioning process by which the authority of both intellectuals and celebrities is negotiated and culture war narratives constructed. In conclusion, the article reflects on the relationship between the increasingly affective nature of online communication and the simultaneous emergence of a strict dichotomy between rationality and emotionality in anti-woke culture war narratives.

‘In the world of movies and talkies’: Hollywood in the Yiddish Forverts, 1920-1935

ABSTRACT This article investigates the presence of Hollywood film in the Yiddish newspaper Forverts in the silent and early sound era, with a particular focus on the movie page ‘In der Velt fun Muvis un Tokis’ (‘In the World of Movies and Talkies’) which was published weekly from 1929 to 1935. In investigating the coverage, I highlight the similarities to and differences from what was published in contemporaneous mainstream, Anglophone fan magazines and newspapers, highlighting how certain differences were a direct reflection of the preoccupations of the Jewish immigrant readership of the Forverts. I then present a case study focusing on the representation of Hollywood star Norma Shearer in this Yiddish newspaper, highlighting how Shearer, a Jewish convert, was represented very differently by the Forverts than she was in the pages of magazines such as Photoplay or Motion Picture. As such, I demonstrate how non-English language sources are vital to the study of historical fan and star studies, and how the Yiddish press can help us gain new insights on familiar topics.

Is It Gender or Is It Race? To Kill a Mockingbird and Its Film Adaptation

This article begins by exploring the national climate in which Lee’s novel appeared, at the height of the civil rights movement in the South, which had a crucial impact on its composition and reception. The major film studios were not initially interested in the novel, but independent filmmakers Alan Pakula (producer) and Robert Mulligan (director), influenced by existentialism, felt attracted to stories with strong dramatization over the spectacular. The film is famously characterized by the voice-over narration of the adult Scout, which embodies a paradoxical duality of perspective: the events are seen from the perspective of the young Scout but described in the language of a mature and articulate adult Scout. In the novel, the destabilization of gender norms is the central theme, and the protagonist is clearly Scout going through the pains of growing up female in a South with very strict definitions of gender roles. This dimension is not prominent in the film version, which gave in to the demands of the Hollywood star system and made the girl’s father, played by Gregory Peck, the main character, and made racism the main issue. The article concludes with a necessary reconsideration of Atticus Finch, subjected in recent years to the complaint that both the novel and the film convey the historically inaccurate message that heroic whites, instead of blacks, were the leaders of the anti-racist movements of the twentieth century. Atticus Finch no doubt remains tied to the accommodating values of his class and he never openly questions the structural racism of which he himself is part, but moral horizons of previous eras are often narrow in comparison with our own, and we should avoid the excesses of presentism and maintain the historical perspective that allows us to celebrate the courage and success of fictional white liberals like Atticus and real ones like Harper Lee herself, who could only speak as whites, not as black victims. Despite all its limitations, Mockingbird did contribute to making hearts and minds reconsider race in America, and it remains a socially and historically important film. Thus, we should at least acknowledge its merit in taking a stand during a period when many films avoided controversial racial matters.

“A barbaric, elemental force”: The Liminal Role of the Eastern European Modern Girl in Western Culture

The Modern Girl was a feminine archetype that emerged in the early 1900s, challenging traditional gender roles and redefining racial boundaries. Particularly revealing of these dynamics is the case of the Eastern European Modern Girl, a figure who was characterized by her barbaric, primitive origins and ‘off-White’ racial status. This article seeks to investigate the construction of femininity and Whiteness in the interwar era through a comparative discourse analysis of two quintessential Modern Girls: Hollywood stars Pola Negri and Gilda Gray. It examines the ways in which each starlet’s ethnicity has been used to situate her as an exotic, racial Other. However, while Eastern European women were often exoticized and Othered, they could also be ideologically ‘Whitened’ through juxtaposition with members of more visibly racialized groups. This paper examines the ways in which Eastern European Modern Girls negotiated this unique position within the boundaries of femininity and, in doing so, argues that the social construction of Whiteness is fundamentally a relational process.

Managing domestic life and dream career in Kavita Daswani’s The Village Bride of Beverly Hills

Kavita Daswani’s second novel The Village Bride of Beverly Hills, also published as Everything Happen for a Reason is one of her romantic comedies. The novel deals with Priya married to Sanjay. After marriage she moves to Los Angeles with her husband. In America she encounters her husband’s demanding parents, who want her to be a good Indian wife, and is expected to fulfill all the needs of his family members. Priya wants to be a journalist, but her husband’s family forbids it. She eventually takes a job as a receptionist at a Hollywood Gossip magazine. She turns herself as an American by wearing western attire and begins to rethink the role of women in society and her role as a wife. When she gets a chance to interview a Hollywood star, she becomes a successful reporter. Her new career sets her newly found views of her family and husband, leading to confrontation.

‘A quintessentially English designer’ from Durban: Victor Stiebel’s South African Childhood (1968)

Victor Stiebel (1907–76), in his obituary in The Times, was described as a well known and highly esteemed British couturier. Yet, for the first eighteen years of his life, Stiebel lived unremarkably in Durban, South Africa, with his middle-class colonial family. In an article written by a fashion historian who appraised his importance within the British fashion industry, Stiebel is described as the quintessential English designer. How did this ‘Englishness’ develop and what evidence do we see of this quality in his autobiography South African Childhood () that covers his childhood years? The leap from Durban to London and his subsequent career as a court dressmaker and couturier, plus designer for Hollywood stars including Vivien Leigh and Katherine Hepburn, is vast, but it is one that Stiebel eagerly made. The bridge, this article argues, is the very ‘Englishness’ that Stiebel encountered in his home and the colonial society of Durban in the Edwardian era in which he grew up. Life in the colonies concentrated this quality in its settlers probably because of their distance from the metropole rather than their proximity. This article sets out to examine what form this ‘Englishness’ took in Stiebel’s life and work, evident visually in his dress designs according to fashion historians, but also, from a literary historian’s point of view, in his autobiographical writing and written correspondence, particularly that with the actress Vivien Leigh.

Transnational dreamscapes: Cinema and visual motifs in the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition

This article explores the connections between moving images and world fairs by focusing on a specific case: the Barcelona 1929 International Exposition. The event, a key moment in the city’s history, showcased cinema as a technological marvel, a vehicle for transnational influence and a tool for propaganda. After an introduction to the political and economic context of the exposition, our analysis covers four main areas: first, we document the role played by Palacio de Proyecciones, a sumptuous palace where new audio-visual devices and techniques were displayed; second, we trace the remains of the mysterious lost film Barcelona Trailer, where Hollywood stars greeted Hispanic audiences and praised the exhibition; third, we offer a critical analysis of the newsreels recorded by the film company CINAES and their mise en scène; finally, we compare visual motifs and shots from the 1929 footage with contemporary images produced today in Barcelona, examining the links between visual culture, technology and gender.

The Centenary on Screen: Transnational Productions of the Easter Rising

The Centenary on Screen:Transnational Productions of the Easter Rising Stephen Joyce (bio) In the run-up to 2016 there was a curious parallel between debates among historians about how to represent the Easter Rising and debates in film studies on ways to control representations of Ireland in a transnational medium. Historiographic debates demonstrated a strong appetite for narratives that eschewed nationalistic celebrations and looked beyond the Irish state to embrace fresh perspectives. The government's Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations declared in its initial statement that the commemorative program should "not only address the key events in Ireland but also enhance the understanding of the wider United Kingdom, European, and world context in which they took place" (Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations). This statement aligns with recent trends in Irish historical studies, with Enda Delaney and Fearghal McGarry asking in the introduction to a special issue on the Irish Revolution in a global context, "To what extent is it necessary to understand revolutionary change within a global as well as nation-state framework?" (6). Yet the field of Irish-media studies has long struggled with the converse problem, namely, that the dominant representations of Ireland on screen have traditionally come from global media giants based in the United States and the United Kingdom, with the Irish nation-state struggling to make any impact given the lack of resources available to compete with Hollywood. As Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill observed in their seminal Cinema and Ireland (1987), "Ireland's peripheral (and ex-colonial) status has not simply hampered the possibilities for a native film industry but, in its absence, has also made possible a set of cinematic representations which have tended to sustain a sense of cultural inferiority" (xi). Thus, rather than the historiographic challenge of trying to integrate global perspectives into national histories, Irish media have typically struggled [End Page 87] to inject national perspectives into a global medium. The commemorations of 1916 on screen thus represent an intriguing intersection of historiographic and media discourses regarding how and by whom narratives about Ireland should be constructed on screen. This article will examine these issues in relation to the three major new productions on the Easter Rising aired by Ireland's national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) in the months before the centenary: the five-part drama series Rebellion from 3 to 31 January 2016, the three-part American documentary 1916: The Irish Rebellion from 10 to 24 February 2016, and finally the British-Irish co-production The Enemy Files on 21 March 2016. How should we interpret the significant participation of foreign media in defining a crucial moment in Ireland's national identity? Is this an example of Ireland's traditional inability to determine its own image on screen, or a demonstration of a new, more transnational approach to understanding Irish history? Before examining these questions and their underlying assumptions, I will first introduce the three productions in more detail. The first to be announced, on 31 March 2015, was the three-part documentary 1916: The Irish Rebellion, an initiative of the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. The first episode establishes the local context in Ireland as well as the Rising's connections with the United States and the Irish diaspora. The second looks at the events of Easter Week, while the final episode studies the Rising's impact both in Ireland and internationally. The documentary had a sizable budget of $3 million and a voiceover by Hollywood star Liam Neeson, and received screenings and broadcasts in over sixty countries worldwide. In many ways the documentary sought to present the definitive account of the Rising; reviewing it for the Irish Times, Bernice Harrison wrote, "Filmmaker Bríona Nic Dhiarmada appears to be declaring that while the TV schedules are cluttered with commemorative programming, all you need to know about the Rising is here." Although it was praised for its narrative sweep and excellent use of documentary footage, many Irish viewers felt that the documentary had little new to say. As Pat Stacey commented in a review for the Irish Independent, "For Irish viewers … our familiarity with the material meant this...

Teaching Anticommunism: Fred Schwarz and American Postwar Conservatism

Teaching Anticommunism: Fred Schwarz and American Postwar Conservatism

Bristol Fashion: Reclaiming Cary Grant for Bristol – Film Heritage, Screen Tourism and Curating the Cary Comes Home Festival

This article re-examines Cary Grant’s star persona arguing that the importance of his Bristolian identity has been under-appreciated. Through a detailed discussion of attempts to promote his Bristolian roots including the biennial Cary Comes Home Festival (established 2014), the article argues that these activities have encouraged a re-evaluation of Cary Grant’s star identity, increased understanding of his importance to Bristol’s screen heritage, and helped promote film tourism to the city. The article outlines the history and development of the festival, critically reflecting on the curatorial practices that underpinned them. It is informed by three main interlinked theoretical areas: star studies; the literature on fan practices of cinematic tourism and pilgrimage, and festival studies. It analyses the ways in which expanded cinema programming provides opportunities for decentering the understanding of Grant’s persona as a Hollywood star, by exploring the festival’s programming of immersive cinematic experiences in locations that were significant to his Bristolian identity. The article also examines the impact of the festival’s role in relocating Grant within Bristol, the ways in which it has enhanced the city’s sense of its cinematic heritage – including achieving UNESCO City of Film status in October 2017 – and the ways in which Bristol has become a living archive through which and in which Cary Grant’s star persona is constructed and circulates, which has helped promote film tourism to the city today.

Conchita Montenegro and the Spanish press: from national pride to nationalist melodrama

ABSTRACT The Spanish press reported on Conchita Montenegro, a Spanish actress who moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s, with ambiguous and contradictory messages. On the one hand, her stint in Tinseltown was celebrated as a national triumph: a young Spanish woman had managed to seduce and conquer the Hollywood film industry. On the other hand, the fact that in Hollywood she played female archetypes at odds with the conservative morality of Catholic Spain was silenced. Decades later, after her death, the Spanish press has restored Conchita Montenegro’s fame, this time through a sensationalist, melodramatic story similar to the way Hollywood stars are promoted. Based on a comparative study between journalistic sources from both periods, this article demonstrates that the way Montenegro was treated as a film star in the press reflects the same nationalist fervour, even though the focus of her patriotic exemplariness in the 1930s gave way to a melodramatic vision of her Hollywood career more recently.

Sonja: The White Swan: Music as narrative device

Anne Sewitsky’s biopic Sonja (Sonja: The White Swan) () is an example of authorial intervention that prioritizes a character-centred narrative rather than historical context. The article focuses on the musical score and the contemporary pop songs that contribute to building the psychological–emotional portrait of Norwegian-born Sonja Henie, champion figure skater and Hollywood star. In Sewitsky’s narrative strategy, non-diegetic music, sometimes deployed anachronistically, is used both to comment on the protagonist’s motivations and behaviour and to express her inner states of mind. By foregrounding Henie’s psyche through music, the film balances her negative and positive sides and presents her as complex and sometimes contradictory individual.

All ‘Shook’ up: Bob Hope, the USO, and How a Night in Greenland Changed Television

Broadcast in January 1955, a single episode of The Bob Hope Show on the Colgate Comedy Hour, Hope’s first USO show on American television, reflects wider shifts taking place in television in the 1950s. The episode demonstrates the increasing importance of recorded and edited television over live TV; the shift in production from New York City to Los Angeles; the increasing role of Hollywood stars over New York’s theater community or radio personalities; changing public tastes; and advertising in the 1950s, which was about to undergo profound change as well. The show also reveals changes in the character of war as Americans get to see for the first time during the Cold War, US military personnel at a remote location. Hope’s jokes and William Holden’s monologue at the end of the show illustrate how Americans had come to see both the specter of communism and the American military after the armistice in Korea, all while broadcasting from the new ‘front lines’ of the Cold War, or in this case what Holden called ‘Malenkov’s patio’.

Italian neorealism and the ‘woman’s film’: Selznick, De Sica and Stazione Termini

As a screenwriter, I don’t consider Stazione Termini a document of my neorealist career, because the Italian-American co-production watered down whatever neorealist seed there was in it (the examination of a very restricted space and time).1 The above quotation from Cesare Zavattini, theoretician of neorealism and screenwriter on Vittorio De Sica’s acclaimed films, can usefully be read alongside a memo sent by the American producer David O. Selznick to De Sica, after the filming of the latter’s Stazione Termini in 1953, a film co-produced by Selznick and starring Montgomery Clift and Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones. In the memo Selznick lamented the ‘distortion of Jennifer’s face and figure into a monstrosity because of what I regarded and still regard, as the almost irrational insistence upon giving superior consideration to photography of buildings’.2 Stazione Termini is a film that is actually two films: based on an original screenplay by Zavattini, and shot on location in Rome’s Termini station, the film was co-produced by Selznick and De Sica’s production company. It was heavily cut by Selznick and released in the USA in 1954 under the title Indiscretion of an American Wife; Italian critics generally regard it as anomalous in the context of De Sica’s career and of the Italian neorealist canon, coming as it does after neorealist classics such as Sciuscià/Shoeshine (1946), Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (1950) and Umberto D. (1952). As will become apparent, compromises involved in its production and distribution, and the involvement of Hollywood stars and crew, mean that some critics do not even regard it as a ‘De Sica film’. The tension indicated in the statement quoted above, between the cinematic focus on the star’s face in close-up and the material environment shot in deep focus, highlights the competing conceptions of cinema on the parts of both De Sica and Selznick, and the extraordinary emphasis Selznick placed on the close-up as a way of safeguarding the star image of Jones. At the same time, Zavattini’s observation of a neorealist idea that is betrayed or diluted in the film is significant, as it invokes the importance of the film’s spatial representation, manifest in its ‘clash’ of cinematographic practices.

Nasreen Munni KabirIn the Year of Sahir: 2021 Diary

BOOKS IN REVIEW Disappearance, The Eternal Return, and, finally, The Image. Canadian author Karoline Georges’s narrative plays out between reality and the image. Reminiscences and insecurities, disappointments and cruelties add flesh to Georges’s skeletal portrait in perfunctory prose. Her narrator learned about femininity from her grandfather’s pinups and her grandmother’s Hollywood stars, from I Dream of Jeannie, Wonder Woman, and Olivia Newton John. Jeannie and Wonder Woman are transformational: by spinning and blinking, they are reborn. Olivia Newton John is “a goddess . . . better still: a fictional character.” Even then, she was learning how to become Anouk. As a child, our narrator studied particular women’s transformational powers and recognized her capacity to blur reality and fiction. “That was my first career choice. Fictional character, body of light on a screen.” As an adult, she transforms her own reality and creates fiction; for work, she models and, in her off hours, becomes Anouk. “A career as a virtually static object was perfect for me . . . spending as much time as possible being passive, as if already I barely existed beyond the image.” The novel hinges on the theme of perception . Initially, the narrator perceives herself through others’ images: “I was learning to collect myself.” But becoming the photographer “creates a bridge between reality and fiction. Between life and death.” Her artistry reveals other means of transformation and preservation, but a family member’s illness challenges the limitations of her creativity nevertheless . With few personal relationships, this potential loss makes her yearn for “a whole truth that substituted for movements of the body, matter, time,” and digitization offers unconventional solutions. Thematic layers and resonance add complexity to this novel of ideas. Georges won the 2018 Governor General’s Award for French-Language Fiction for this novel, De synthèses; its English translator, Rhonda Mullins, previously won a Governor General’s Award in 2015 for translating Jocelyne Saucier’s Les héritiers de la mine. These are the kinds of connections that The Imago Stage’s narrator forges with Anouk: real but as much about separation as connection. The Imago Stage is flat, intensely orchestrated , and nearly lifeless: essentially and purposefully so. Marcie McCauley Toronto Nasreen Munni Kabir In the Year of Sahir: 2021 Diary Chennai, India. Westland. 2020. 144 pages. MUCH OF INDIA’S LITERARY and cinematic worlds are geared up to celebrate with considerable enthusiasm the birth centenary of Sahir Ludhianvi (Abdul Hayee; 1921–1980), “a colossus among film lyricists,” considered by many as one of the foremost Urdu poets of the twentieth century. As her contribution to these festivities , Nasreen Munni Kabir, the eminent scholar of Indian film, has published this elegantly designed, spiral-bound, diarylike collection of reminiscences of Sahir’s many prominent friends and colleagues, numerous, never-before-published photographs , brief, incisive essays, remarks, and intriguing personal bits and pieces of sahiriana . For example, the back cover shows Sahir’s actual diary for August 23–26, 1978, along with his entry for the 24th: “Kaifi / Dinner – Faiz,” presumably a meeting with poet Kaifi Azmi (1919–2002) and dinner with poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984). Akshay Manwani, author of Sahir Ludhianvi : The People’s Poet (2013)—the best biography of the poet in English—introduces the volume with a concise essay that charts the trajectory of Sahir’s poetry from its beginnings to its etiolation in the 1970s. The diary concludes with Kabir’s incisive and contextualizing essay “The Story behind Parchhaiyan and Shadow Speaks,” which introduces a reprint of novelist/film director K. A. Abbas’s long-out-of-print English translation of one of Sahir’s most famous (and lengthiest) poems, the antiwar Parchhaiyan (Shadows; 1955), a harrowing account of what two young lovers experience during the terror of World War II. It appears side by side with the original text in Urdu script. 112 WLT SPRING 2021 0 Sahir started writing poetry during his high school days and continued on into college, from which he was expelled for refusing to take his final exams as a political protest. He worked as a writer and subeditor of a number of major Urdu literary journals in Lahore, where he came in contact with young...

Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball by Dan Taylor

Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball by Dan Taylor

Race, Celebrity and Fashion: Anna May Wong in Spanish Magazines of the 1930s

Anna May Wong was the most widely known Asian American film actress of her generation, achieving unprecedented success in the Hollywood and European industry. When she traveled to Spain in 1935 to perform at the Teatro Casablanca in Madrid, she was already an international star and her visit garnered extensive coverage from the Spanish press, particularly film magazines of the period. These magazines provided their largely female readership with access to Hollywood stars such as Wong, whose celebrity was the site of complex negotiations of race, ethnicity and citizenship in the United States and Europe during the 1930s. Publications such as Cinegramas and Popular Film represented Wong for Spanish readers who, although removed from the particularities of race politics in the United States, were nevertheless intrigued by her ‘exotic allure’, positioned as she was at the intersection of racial otherness and Hollywood glamour. By reading Wong in Spanish magazines from the 1930s, this article considers how Spanish readers might have used these representations as a tool for negotiating their own identities as cosmopolitan at a moment when Spain was often perceived as existing on the cultural margins of Western Europe.